Soapmaking…It all starts with the grass.

One thing leads to another. I never imagined we would be making our own soap on top of everything else. But we use a lot of soap in the Bed and Breakfast and so Soapmaking has been added to our list of seasonal tasks. If I stop to think about how and why certain tasks have become part of the work that we do here, almost all of them can be attributed to our 5 acres of grass.

For many reasons we chose to get a cow instead of a lawnmower to keep the meadows open. That lead to milk, lots of it, more than we can easily deal with and pigs love milk. Each Spring we get 2 small pigs and carefully feed them milk, combined with leftover garden produce and kitchen scraps and organic barley until they grow into hefty hogs that become the homegrown meats that many of our guests enjoy. Not only do you get bacon and sausage from pigs but you get a lot of fat. From the fat we make lard and from the lard, soap.

This week Jennie and Kate made Sage and Rosewood scented soap. You won’t find a long list of hard to pronounce chemicals on our soap labels. Just a few ingredients; lard, coconut and olive oils, and lye. After much stirring, these ingredients combine to make a smooth and creamy bar of soap with rich lather and lots of moisture for dry winter skin.